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Jumping into Faction Paradox

Faction Paradox has a reputation as one of Doctor Who’s most obscure and high-quality spinoffs. Because of this, everyone’s been asking me: How do I get into Faction Paradox? Here’s my answer. (v3.4)

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What is Faction Paradox?

A Beginner’s Guide for Doctor Who Fans

After the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, which introduced Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor, the story of the Eighth Doctor’s life continued in a series of novels published by BBC Books. One of the first ones, Alien Bodies (which you can read without any background, and is highly recommended all-around), introduced the idea of a gigantic time war looming in the Doctor’s future.

This isn’t the Last Great Time War; this is something far stranger. The Time Lords are fighting a mysterious Enemy, whose name they’ve hidden at all costs, and they’re losing. Badly. The fighting is less over “places” and “things” than “ideas” and “history”, and the scramble for conceptual territory has pushed the Great Houses – the families / political groups of Time Lords on Gallifrey – farther and farther away from their principles of non-intervention and basic decency.

The Great Houses and their Enemy aren’t the only players in this War in Heaven.

There are the godlike Celestis, formerly known as Gallifrey’s Celestial Intervention Agency, who removed themselves from history and now spend their time making Faustian pacts with lesser species.

There are the humanoid Type 103 TARDISes, which work with the Great Houses but are probably best understood as another group with their own motivations.

There are the posthumans, the wildly-diverse diaspora of humanity’s far-future descendants, who claim neutrality but might have enigmatic ties to the Enemy.

And then there’s Faction Paradox. As one of the authors, Philip Purser-Hallard, explains:

The simplest way to explain it all to normal human beings is this: Faction Paradox is what happens when time-travelling demigods turn Goth.

That’s all the Faction is, really: a rebellious subculture, with all the usual transgressive behaviour and imagery … except that this movement originated on a world of scientific hierarchs with the power to eliminate entire histories at the nod of a head.

Everything else – the rituals with blood and shadows, the bone masks and armour, the cultlike pseudo-family structure – follows from this. The Great Houses are sticklers for the orderly progression of history, so the Faction embrace chaos, crisis and paradox. The Houses’ members are immortal and sterile, so the Faction play with the shocking concepts of death, biology and family. The Houses are arch-rationalists, so the Faction regularly contravene the laws of continuity, history and physics.

Finally the Great Houses are isolationist, so the Faction’s founders long ago opened their membership to selected humans and others from outside their Homeworld.

All of these tendencies are illustrated in the Faction’s perverse choice of home territory: the eleven days excised from the month of September 1762 by Britain’s shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The London of this nonexistent period has been colonised and indefinitely extended by the Faction, in willful defiance of all sense or logic.

Since the Homeworld itself has been threatened by an Enemy who can scarcely even be satisfactorily defined, let alone identified, the Faction have been profoundly unwilling to choose sides … or at least, to pick one and stick to it.

Instead, rather like teenagers with the keys to their parents’ timeships, they hang around the coolest corners of the War, never fully participating except when forced to, yet forever pursuing their own stubborn, fashionable and often quite baffling agenda.

The Faction themselves aren’t the focus of the Faction Paradox series – in many stories, they don’t even appear! – but their role as Prometheus among the Titans, bringing humanity into a War far beyond anything we’ve ever experienced, makes them our perfect guides in this universe.

In the Eighth Doctor novels, the War in Heaven was given a super unsatisfactory ending in The Ancestor Cell when the Doctor lost his memory and spent a hundred years on Earth. When he emerged from his exile, the Gallifreys were gone (yes, Gallifreys) and the War was over. The Faction Paradox series fills this gap with stories set during the War: stories that don’t feature the Doctor but nonetheless tell the story of his universe. It pushes the setting in some fantastic new directions, and overall it’s some of the most experimental material to ever come out of Doctor Who. I strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys speculative fiction, regardless of whether you’re a Who fan or not.

If you’re interested in starting the Faction Paradox series, take a look at my “where to start” guide!

#faction paradox #fp 101 #eighth doctor #doctor who #effortpost

An index of connections

between Faction Paradox and other series. None of these are need to understand or enjoy any Faction Paradox stories, but in my opinion, they help a lot. Please reblog and/or comment to let me know any I’m missing!

#faction paradox #the book of the war #fp 101 #effortpost